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SLW210's Discipline Details

Occupation

Design Draftsman

Discipline

Multi-disciplinary

Details

Mostly do drafting related to manufacturing. From doing site layouts with proposed updates, additions and renovations to be budgeted and submitted for bid, to updating and changing existing drawings to reflect maintenance and repair/revision work done on site.

Using

AutoCAD 2011

Join Date

May 2007

Location

South Florida, USA

Posts

11,330

See "Similar Threads" at the bottom of this page and do a search for Terrain Modeling.

“A narrow mind and a fat head invariably come on the same person” Zig Zigler

SLW210's Discipline Details

Occupation

Design Draftsman

Discipline

Multi-disciplinary

Details

Mostly do drafting related to manufacturing. From doing site layouts with proposed updates, additions and renovations to be budgeted and submitted for bid, to updating and changing existing drawings to reflect maintenance and repair/revision work done on site.

I'm doing an analysis of radar coverage in the vicinity of wind farms. There's probably an easier way to do what I'm doing with GIS, but I'm not such a GIS stud. And analyzing different radar beam patterns (vertical and horizontal shape) seemed easier to do in AutoCAD with my skill set.

Now that I have the terrain maps in as a 3D mesh, the analysis is relatively straight forward. I was getting a little tripped up because the transfer from my mapping program was putting the x-y coordinates in lat/long, and the z coordinates (terrain altitude) in feet. There were also some artifacts along the edges (values of -99999.). The combination of the whole mesh being extremely stretched in the z-direction, and the edge artifacts made it very difficult to see what was actually going on.

Once I figured out what I had, it was relatively straight forward to clean up. I changed the export bounds in my mapping program so that the bounds didn't fall off the edge. I turned the mesh into a block, reinserted it with the appropriate xyz scale factors, and exploded it back into a 3d mesh.

I use Global Mapper as my mapping program. It was only $300. And though it doesn't have the ability to perform many of the more advanced functions of other GIS programs, it's extremely easy to use, and absolutely excels at converting between different data formats.